I think to be fair, it depends on the distance of the race. As noted, in my longer distance training lately, I am going by HR. I am concerned that in a 5k race, you can adjust too late by waiting for a mile to check pacing. An example is a local race where I followed a tall guy in a Fleet Feet Racing singlet as he could "part the seas" . I usually run 7 min miles for a 5k. I looked up at mile 1 and ran a 5:25. By then, it was too late. My friends ran by me at 1.4 miles and could see I was done. Good lesson learned and not the end of the world. Part of the fun is learning. I would like to do longer races as I have been doing some training rides with a friend training for IM Couer d Alene. He has a very good coach. We rode 50 miles and he had to keep in a certain zone. It was great. We then ran 4 miles off the bike and I didn't even feel like I had worked out. Thanks for the input. I'm trying to get better at this and have a long ways to go.....

I struggle to see the need for instantaneous pace myself, so the views in this thread are becoming quite interesting. To me, it doesnt seem worthwhile in a race provided you have experience actually racing. In a 5K, for example, you just learn how to pace yourself for X number of minutes after youve done it a few times. At that point, you should really be racing by feel anyway...dont let yourself get caught up in hitting perfect splits (for a marathon or something, splits are much more important in the first half of the race. But there is also lots of time to correct once youve seen a mile split) and if you get caught going out too fast, put your head down, gut out whatever you can, and learn for next time. Obviously people have different opinions on this, but just my thoughts....

Agree, everyone has to use training tools the way that works for them. In a way, I actually like that pace is unreliable presently - I'll explain. Because it was so wildly unreliable I have setup the watch to take mile splits and I have lap pace on my main screen. So, if I'm to be running at a given pace I can see how I'm trending for that given mile. For long steady pace runs or intervals with steady pace -- it's forced me to think longer term instead of in the moment. That said, I would REALLY like the instant pace feature to work similar to how it does on the 310xt. Why you ask? Short paced intervals. Right now, if I'm supposed to do 30s to 2m intervals @ better than 5k pace, as an example, it makes it much harder (e.g. not possible) for me to see what I'm doing for that effort to make sure I'm appropriately pacing. The only way that I can think to do this now, and it's a pain, is to create a workout, with said intervals, and then the watch would calculate the lap (or interval) pace.

In short, I can get by -- but would really like to see Garmin get this right.

I think the other big benefit of the instantaneous pace is if you set up a workout in the device and use pace for the gauge for various parts of the workouts. I thought about doing this but with the instant pace broken I decided against it and just current lap average. I just keep looking every so often during the tempo miles to make sure I'm on track especially at the beginning when I tend to feel fresh and go faster and of course towards the end.

I just got my 910xt and it will not take a charge. I e-mailed support and they told me to reset it, which I have done several times. I have tried to charge it in the wall and off the computer. It just vibrates and says "charging" but never goes anywhere. I was hoping someone might have some insight or ideas since this is the first Garmin I have owned that has the clip-on charger. Thanks in advance for any help, I just want to use my new toy. :)

Are you sure it is not already fully charged? Mine was charged out of the box.

As for instant pace. I use it all the time. Works for me, I don't see why people seem so keen for others not to use it. It's not like I spend my time staring at the watch and going slightly faster or slower to hit a certain pace. It's not really that much different from the small increment average pace that others talk about except that it is current. Powered by - Team Dimond | Wave Physiotherapy | PB+J Coaching | Kelowna Cycle

Well I am in my fifties. By this time a great advantage is that your body automaticlly seems to know what effort for the distance. To many times I changed my effort for time goals and screwed up. Again, that is just me though. For an IM for the bike I will just have hr and distance on my computer and am either pleaently surprised of disappointed at mile 56. First time I will look at time. I do not think you are using the watch as a crutch. You are using the tool correctly. There was nothing for me to use years ago for current pace, so I learned with different tools, that all.

I'm also in my fifties and got a late start to running (early 40s), and even later into triathlon. I started with the Garmin 301 many moons ago and it never trusted the current pace. I now have the 910xt and really like it, but continue to use the running in a very similar way. Here are a couple of things that have worked really well for me. - I always display current average lap pace which really tells me the most about my pacing. Just this morning, I was finishing a 20 mile training run with a couple of friends. The goal was to do the last 5 miles at a 6:45 pace, so every 50 yards I would check the average lap pace to see if we were going too fast or slow and we would adjust accordingly. It works like a charm. Tough workout though!

- During races I sometimes set the lap distance to .25 miles instead of 1.0 miles. This way I get more frequent updates - kind of like running mile repeats on the track and checking your watch every 400 meters to see if you are on target pace. Of course you can set it to every 200 meters if you want. One of the best things about the 910xt is the vibration alerts !!! You don't have to remember to look at your watch (sometimes it is hard to hear the beep), the vibration is a great reminder and tells you that you just hit a lap (whatever the distance).

- I also display total average pace for the run. This tells me during if I am still tracking to my pace target for the entire workout. I targeted between 7:45 and 8min pace for the first 15 miles this morning; the first were a litte slow (uphill), but then averaged out nicely as the run progressed.

I use the same settings on the bike. The total average pace is a real motivator for me at the end of a ride to try to get my ride pace up (or at least not lose too much on the last hill to my house).

So far, I'm really impressed with this watch. Great in the pool and on the bike. I look forward to some of the upgrades - I think they can really add a lot of nice features in software updates AND on the Garmin Connect web site.

This has just come up in several threads, and the universal answer has been "you don't want/need that anyway." Statements like that just seem to ignore the fact that Garmin delivered a watch with a feature that doesn't work. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

To clarify, so I dont sound so glib. I might not have felt compelled to start a thread titled, "You dont need the instant pace feature on a Garmin" but when I see the outcry about a "feature" I feel is pointless and counterproductive even when it does work, I also see an opportunity to perhaps convince someone to ditch it.

Doesnt mean I let Garmin off the hook for it. They are so embarrasingly bad about their software. Thats far from the only bug in the 910 software. They couldnt even get the light button right.

I think it is a good tool for longer distances, when I do long runs it's nice to know what kind of a pace I am at for that particular mile. 14.6 miles in, when my form and feel are sloppy anyway, looking down to see I'm still on or off pace sure as shit beats doing math while I'm running. To instantaneously give you your pace 10 steps into a mile is a pretty damn good feature if you ask me. The best place to get a feel for your pace is the track though. When I stopped using music and started listening to my body while I was running intervals and tempos I got a better understanding of how to run even splits. I can easily tell when I'm running a minute and a half faster than I should be, thank you Baynard Stadium track sessions. And I didn't have to pay $450.00 for that. Just bought a bottle of water and ran. When asked what irks him he replied, "Cheats, smokers and arrogance. In that order." -C. Stoltz

No you are not reading too much into it. I agree 100%. I used instant pace on my fr305 for years and it always worked great. I figured this was an upgrade and am pretty disappointed. I like to know how fast I am running now, not how fast I ran 10 minutes ago. If I am climbing a hill, I like to know how much the hill has slowed me down. In fact the whole reason I initially bought my fr305 is to be able to determine how fast I was running. At any rate, it worked great on the 305 so it was my expectation that it would work on the 910. As I mentioned earlier, the fr305 had a smoothing filter option which was configurable. Not sure if it was this smoothing filter that helped. Now, with the SW update it is much better then earlier but still a bit jumpy and less accurate as the 305. I hope Garmin fixes this, at least to be as good as the cheaper 305.

There was the notion that the faster you ran the more accurate the instant pace. Could this still be true with the sw update? So maybe, us slower runners are still seeing some accuracy issues. I run somewhere between 9 and 10 min miles. It seemed like when I was at the 9 range it was ok but when i slowed down to be closer to 10 min mile it started showing 11 and sometimes 12 min miles. I know I am not that slow.

FWIW, I had no plan for my run this morning, so I decided to run miles at various steady paces to check the SW update. For me, the pace issue was fixed. Prior to the update I was seeing +/-1:50/mile. Mile splits still came out accurate and commensurate with RPE. Today, with miles between 6:00 and 9:00 I saw a consistent variance of +/- 5s/mile on instant pace with less frequent pace changes on screen. Tested miles at 30s/mile increments on a known course with checkpoints for each mile. Splits and distances were still accurate. This is exactly what I've seen over the past year with a FR610.